Social Media

HOW TO: Optimize Your Content for the Cloud

PJ Gurumohan is the co-founder and CEO of GENWI, a cloud-based mobile presence creation and management platform. He holds two patents in wireless technology, has authored several journal articles, routinely speaks at technology conferences and has held various engineering positions at IBM and US Airways.

The smartphone is increasingly becoming the interface through which people process the world around them.

This increasing popularity of the smartphone is also coming up against another interesting trend. People are, in the words of a quotable television advertisement, migrating “to the Cloud!”

Look no further than Amazon and Apple for examples of this: Amazon is urging entertainment content fans to move their libraries to a remote digital locker. Just as Apple’s introduction of the iPod and the iTunes platform at the beginning of the past decade revolutionized the music and digital entertainment industries, Amazon’s cloud service could do the same for digital entertainment this decade. The popularity of Netflix, Hulu and Pandora also indicate a migration into the cloud.

Any producer on the web — whether they deal in general software, entertainment, news or any consumable content — needs to keep a few content principles in mind as this evolution continues.

Create Content Adaptable to All Devices With a Seamless Brand

Though unlikely, today’s iPad could be tomorrow’s BetaMax (or, perhaps more appropriately, “netbook”). At the beginning of this piece, I cited a number of figures related to how handset adoption is changing. The truth is, though, we don’t know what the preferred medium of content consumption will be five years from now. Even with the widespread adoption of the smartphone, the market share is split among Android, Blackberry, iPhone and Windows Phone. Maybe the media device du jour will be a 7-inch tablet. Maybe it will be an even smaller version of a smartphone that you can hook up to a 70-inch HD television screen. Who knows? All we know is that people will still be interested in consuming content, hopefully yours. The way to make sure that happens is to create branded content that can survive many software and hardware iterations.

Make Your Content Available in Every App Store ...

In the spirit of keeping your brand seamless, it pays to make sure your content is available to every conceivable consumer through the vehicles of content delivery they have chosen. Whether it’s the App Store (for iPhone, iPad or Mac), Blackberry App World, Android Market, Windows Marketplace for Mobile, the traditional PC software download or a future software marketplace, ensure your content has the ability to adapt to that marketplace. You don’t want to be left out of any potential avenues of distribution, especially in a volatile environment where many different and strong players are trying to position themselves as the dominant platform.

... But Optimize Your Content for Each Platform

Making your content available in every app and software depository is easier said than done. Make sure you know the properties of each target OS and application market you’re entering — not only its internal guidelines but also whether you’ve branded your content in a way that makes sense for that store and whether it has the scalability (and you have the coders) to keep up with internal OS updates.

Make Your Content Configurable and Flexible

In thinking about how your app fits with each interface or piece of media consumption hardware, also consider how users actually interact with that content. Even though network-based content has taken a step back to closed source in the last few years — due in large part to the popularity of Apple's hardware — that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take other usability issues into account for the future. No matter where you come down on the closed source vs. open source debate, it doesn’t hurt to appropriate the best and most useful principles of the latter camp. Give the users of your content as much control as possible over that content without diluting your brand. This will give them a personal connection to your content that can span platform changes to come in the future.

Brand Your Content, Not Your Code

To put it another way, think about what makes your content, not your existing platform, special. For example, when I started iSites, we aggregated content on the iPhone for the two largest student newspapers in northern Callfornia: Stanford Daily and UC Berkeley’s Daily Californian. There was a time when students could only get the content from these two papers by physically going to a campus kiosk and picking up a piece of newsprint. In our small way, we were able to bring that campus kiosk to every Cal or Stanford student who happened to have an iPhone, in addition to staff, alumni or anyone else with an interest in the universities. There will probably be a day when both content platforms will seem as dated as the telegraph. However, those universities’ two enduring brands and the need for the communities to stay connected remain fundamentally unchanged. Platforms come and go, and whether the smartphone or the cloud in tandem offer an abiding solution to this diverse marketplace remains to be seen. But well-branded and compelling content will always find a way to endure.

Interested in more Content Creation resources? Check out Mashable Explore, a new way to discover information on your favorite Mashable topics.

What's Hot

More in Social Media

What's New

What's Rising

What's Hot

Mashable
is a leading global media company that informs, inspires and entertains the digital generation. Mashable is redefining storytelling by documenting and shaping the digital revolution in a new voice, new formats and cutting-edge technologies to a uniquely dedicated audience of 42 million monthly unique visitors and 24 million social followers.